Spreadsheet canvas

The Spreadsheet canvas is a grid of cells for numbers and short text, with per-cell formatting and named columns.

Editing

Select the canvas and press Enter to move into the grid. Once inside, the arrow keys move between cells and Escape leaves the grid entirely.

Buttons that appear inside a row — the per-row controls — are deliberately kept out of the Tab order. If every row contributed its own tab stops, a grid of two hundred rows would make Tab useless for getting past the canvas. The grid is one stop; movement inside it is the arrow keys’ job.

Search reaches individual cells

A spreadsheet is not opaque to search. Cell contents are indexed, and a hit inside a grid is reported as a cell rather than as a page: the result row reads cell · <column heading> · row N. Activating it opens the page, scrolls the row into view, and flashes and focuses the exact cell.

The cell: and column: qualifiers let you search cell contents or column names specifically. See Search.

Hidden datasets

A grid can be hidden — useful when a canvas has been converted into another form and the original is kept for reference. Hidden datasets are excluded from search results, so a converted-and-hidden original does not show up as a phantom duplicate of the thing that replaced it.